These are before and after photos of my bed. The before state is unmade, while the after state is made. Here's the story: having been homebound for 12 or so years, I have become accustomed to an extremely easy lifestyle, and, being accustomed to easiness, I have become rather lazy when it comes to making my bed. On average, I'd say I make it 4 times out of 10 (mostly to please my mother). So whats the point of this? The before state is like my current mind. Disordered, sloppy. The After state is ordered. But that's not the point either. Rather, the point is more philosophical. If I can coerce myself to make my bed everyday, even though emotionally, I really don't feel up to it, then I can coerce myself to maintain the type of focus and attention necessary to make changes in my thinking - and in my brain.
All sorts of little activities like this can serve as symbols. Some emotional part - in the limbic system, for example, prompts you to engage in a certain activity or inactivity. Whether that be making my bed, or biting my nails. Speaking of nail biting, brace yourself:
This is me peeling, biting and otherwise disfiguring my thumb nail on my right hand. I've decided it would be for me to apply the same logic to bed making to stopping my nail biting. With the former, it's something I'm not doing - and so I'm challenging my laziness. Here, it's something I am doing - peeling off layers of nail because it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction (without causing bleeding. Once bleeding occurs, I wince and complain "Oh why did I do that!").
My problem is maintaining a state of embodied self awareness. As described in that earlier entry, embodied self awareness is experiencing life in the subjective emotional present. Usually, life for me - at least when talking becomes relevant - involves conceptual self awareness. A normal person when they get ready to speak engages the feelings they're having at the moment. This is embodiment. I on the other hand observe myself as I speak - this is conceptualizing myself as I attempt to engage my feelings. Since you can't do both things at once, Its actually just me ruminating on some perceived malady while I try to sound normal. Life in this mode, you can imagine, can be extremely isolating, painful, etc. Living this way for many years, being dissociated from your own true emotions on things for this length of time, can make the experience of embodied self awareness feel absurd. In a way - it is! Psychologists rightly point out that embodied self awareness - engagement with your emotions - is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable. You can't "put" yourself in that state. You can only create the conditions to enter that state without your meddling conceptual self awareness interfering.
I know how to enter these states. I experience them now and again. Embodied self awareness can be: embodied physically, in how you feel in your body, and embodied vocally, in how you feel in your voice. I've become fairly good at feeling good in my body. I go to the library everyday to pass the hours, reading, and most of all, exposing myself to other people. I've learned to stay in my body when someone comes near me - if they look at me, I more or less am learning to train myself not to be on "high alert" about it. There's no reason to. People look. Oddly enough. Sometimes when I've found myself more securely in this state, if someone looks at me and smiles, I smile back! This may seem absolutely banal to most people, but for me, for someone who conceptualizes and watches himself, who anticipates the formation of feelings and anxiously observes his facial and bodily activity, to just spontaneously shoot a smile back at the person who smiles at me, in the subjective emotional presence, frankly, it felt like somebody else (and not in a bad way).
Episodes like the above encourage me. I have to dampen down my level of alertness. The PTSD has me looking this way and that in a very conceptualized state of mind, and only recently have I become aware of it, and understood it in a sort of evolutionary psychological sort of way. If I raise my hand towards my dog - she'll quiver and cower and her tail will snap between her legs; her ears will fall back, her eyes will widen and her muscles will tense. She's in a state of high alert (of course, I don't ever hit my dog - she's the runt of her litter, she, like her owners, is an anxious little thing). I see this state in myself. In the subjective emotional present, things are slowed down, consciousness is more focused in one area, while blanking out everything else around you. In an alert state, my mind is cued to my environment. Any change engenders a corresponding change in my state of mind. I need to withdraw from this habit, feel myself, my body, my breathing, and most of all, my emotions.
Training the brain will be a life long activity for me. I'm still 27, young, intelligent and physically able. My bed will be get made and my fingers will be left alone - such activities will hopefully train my limbic system who the boss is - the dorsolateral PFC!
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